Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to techniques for processing electronic messages. More particularly, the present invention relates to techniques for reviewing, categorizing and tagging email documents.
Collaboration using electronic messaging, such as email and instant messaging, is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Many users and organizations have transitioned to “paperless” offices, where information and documents are communicated almost exclusively using electronic messaging. Users and organizations have expended time and money to manage, sort and archive increasing volumes of digital documents and data.
Management of electronic resources has however become a more and more expensive process. Part of the reason is that many regulatory agencies—such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the U.S.—have become increasingly aggressive in enforcing regulations requiring storage, analysis, and reporting of information based on electronic messages.
Another reason is due to the increasing ubiquitous use of electronic discovery (e-discovery) in the litigation context. E-discovery refers to a process in which electronic resources are sought, located, secured, and searched with the intent of using it as evidence in litigation. The nature of modern digital data makes digital documents extremely well-suited to investigation. Compared to paper-based documents, digital data can be searched with relative ease. Digital data is relatively difficult to destroy since electronic documents are typically scattered and stored throughout a network during their normal usage. Standard discoverable electronic data include texts, images, calendar and schedule data, audio files, spreadsheets, animation files, databases, web site archives, even computer programs such as viruses and the signatures they may leave behind.
Since even a small company in the modern world can be subjected to a constant stream of potential and actual litigations, all companies must have an effective policy and infrastructure to carry out duties on the one hand to preserve documents that may be relevant to the stream of potential and actual litigations and on the other to protect documents that may be privileged to the company and documents that contain valuable industrial secret that should justifiably be kept from competitors.
Due to the important role emails play in a modern corporate setting, emails are becoming a key target of e-discovery requests. One problem with processing email documents is that the very same characteristics that make email documents robust and durable—the extent by which electronic documents are routinely duplicated and distributed—also make email documents difficult to review and manage. Just sorting through the redundant information alone can be costly. The competing goals of making sure an investigation is exhaustive and protecting irrelevant and confidential information from adversaries and competitors can make e-discovery a very delicate task.
In a typical discovery process, many companies already allocate teams of employees spending days and weeks reviewing emails in order to respond to regulatory audits and investigations. As emails become increasingly the standard mode of corporate communications, the pressure to produce emails with multi-megabyte attachments stored in various diverse and propriety formats in various high-stakes litigations will only intensify.
For these reasons, there is a continual need for tools that can help organizations better manage and lower the costs of reviewing email documents in an e-discovery and litigations context.